As of January 1, 2016, Gapers Block is on indefinite hiatus. The site will remain up in archive form while we evaluate our options, which may include a redesign or sale.✶ Thank you for your readership and contributions over the past 12-plus years. ✶

Tomorrow night, February 7, Myiti Sengstacke Rice will be at Radcliffe Hunter House (3800 S. Michigan Ave.) signing copies of her book Chicago Defender. The author is a direct descendant of Robert Sengstacke Abbott, who founded the Chicago Defender newspaper in 1905. Starting out humbly, printed in his land lady's kitchen, the Defender quickly made Abbott one of the few black millionaires of his time. The influential paper successfully promoted the "Great Migration" of 1.5 million Southern blacks to the North between 1915 and 1925. It also campaigned for anti-lynching legislation and integrated sports. Langston Hughes was a columnist and its pages published the early poems of Gwendolyn Brooks. Sengstacke Rice is the founder of Sengstacke Media Advisors and has been published in Ebony, Jet, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Reading begins at 6pm.